Good enough, thanks.
John

i partitioned mine.. i have a 60GB 7200RPM drive.. i have 20GB for windows (C:) and the rest for (p:) and i store all my clips in p along with backups of otherthings (pictures, email and bookmarks, etc)
i like keeping them sep. i can defrag seperately then...

but to each his own i suppose...

p

I agree there are benefits to breaking a single drive into 2 partitions. I do this on my system along with having a seperate physical drive. First off, you will avoid having the drive with your OS on it becoming highly framented due to recording large media files to it on a regular basis. Second of all, it makes it much easier to restore things. Say you decide you need to reformat the partition where you OS lies, you can easily reformat that partition and reinstall the OS without worrying about losing any media/data files in that process. Then vice-versa. If you want to backup the entire data partition, this task becomes much easier without searching through OS folders and such. Also with the partition that becomes heavily framented due to large media files, the time it takes to"defragment" gets cut down.

Basically what you should do, is create 2 partions, maybe even 3 on that single drive if you can't afford to get another physical drive.

With 2 partitions:
Partition 1: install just your OS
Partition 2: install all programs to this and also designate it as your temporary recording drive and store all media files on it.

With 3 partitions:
Partion1: Install just your OS
Partition2: Install your programs
Partiion3: Record all media here, and temp recorded files assignable in Vegas.

Indeed there are benefits, but nothing will be faster, and the question was, would it improve Vegas' performance. I too, keep my laptop drives partitioned, but don't expect better performance, and potentially expect worse, again, depending on system configuration.

Due to the way that most hard drives are accessed, one sees better performance in the first half of a drive than one does in the second half. In fact, sustained data access rates fall continuously over the space of a disk. Hard-drive performance tests betray this problem when run over the full space of a drive. This leads to one of the benefits of high-end RAID solutions (such as those from Medéa), that their striping pattern leads to guaranteed sustained large-file read performance that is higher than it would be for a collection of disks striped beginning to end. The effects of this can also be seen in the increased performance of 80GB drives made with platter densities suitable for 120GB drives (Barracuda V vs. Barracuda IV), as the first 40GB of each 60GB platter is generally used in these configurations.

Because of this behavior, you'll see better media performance if you split your drive into two partitions and keep media on the first partition. If you're planning on doing what most people's first instinct is, breaking a disc into two partitions and keeping the OS on the first partition, rethink your strategy.

The short answer to the original question is that partitioning definitely has an effect on performance, but how a drive is partitioned determines whether that effect is positive or negative.

"one sees better performance in the first half of a drive than one does in the second half."

Good stuff, this is one point I was going to get into, but I wasn't sure in which direction on the platter that the disc is first formated from. Thus, the outter edge or the inner edge? I know disc performance is better when reading from the outter edge, because there is less head travel as compared to the inner part of the HD platter. So, I'm not sure what you mean by "half" of the drive. I wasn't sure how the partitions physically broke up the drive. So by your explanation, when you say "first half" for the first partition, do you mean the HD disc platter is formated for this partition from the outer edge of the disc platter and the "second half" for the second partition is formatted inward from the prior partition?

Thanks for correcting my misinformation. I'm still old school, where windows would make you install the OS on the first partition or drive letter" C:", where WinXP let's you put it on any drive letter assignment.

Thanks,
Red

This is what I was referring to regarding system configuration. If you put your media on the outer rings/second partition, you'll see worse performances. Doug Dixon did a really nice article on this a couple years back, I can't find it in a cursory search on the web.
Canopus has a nice video-oriented speed test, and their website has some nice info about setting up a partitioned system.

If you put your media on the outer part of the disk (first partition), you'll see better performance. In principle you're right (first partition == good), but it's just a detail about the inner workings of the disk.


Just to recap, here's the layout you should use if you have one 80GB disk and want a 20GB system partition:

Primary partition 1: 60GB (Media)
Primary partition 2: 20GB (System)

If you are low on memory and often find yourself paging to disk (go buy more memory. It's cheap), then you can use a configuration like this in a pinch:

Primary partition 1: 2GB (Paging)
Primary partition 2: 58GB (Media)
Primary partition 3: 20GB (System)

I was just using "half" as an illustrative divider, which is why I pointed out that sustained data access rates fall continuously. Even this is not actually true, as the data rates fall only at cylinder boundaries.

Hard disks, unlike CDs, generally are accessed outside-in, so the best performance is realized at the beginning of the disk.

Oops, I had that confused, I thought the inner ring was the first partition. Thanks for the catch and education, Matt.

"Oops, I had that confused, I thought the inner ring was the first partition."

Yep, wasn't sure on my side either thus why I didn't go into the innner/outter disc read performance differences for my first reply. Thanks for the information Matt, easy to remember now because, as you mentioned it works in the opposite direction as of how a CD is written to.

Ok, How about this now? This is how my system is configured for hardives and was wondering if there was maybe a better way to set it up. I'm currently using a dual boot system and here's how it's setup.


EIDE HD#1 7200rpm 10 Gig Master IDE channel 1:
Partition#1(win98se) 3Gig
Partition #2(WinXP) 4Gig
Partition #3 (Installed Programs) 3Gig

EIDE HD#2 7200rpm 200 Gig Slave IDE channel 1
Partition #1 (temp media storage) 200Gig

SCSI 10Krpm HD#3 18 Gig
Partition#1 (Working media) 18Gig

that's good unless you have a program that reads a LOT of data from the disc (normally games). But, you know what? Odds are you wouldn't notice much of a difference if your computer is fast enough. :)

You're using NTFS on the XP/ HD2 & 3, right?

Only one I'm using NTFS is on the Storage Drive. The others I want to be able to access through a Win98 boot up, thus Fat32 on those. I've had to use Win98 a couple times to fix things on the WinXP install a couple times or prefer to use that to do a new install of XP. The SCSI drive is Fat32 also.

Making then NTFS would probley speed things up.

Know what I do as a "backup" OS? I've got Mandrake Linux installed. It can read/write NTFS no problem. I duel boot with Win2k & Linux (using the LILO boot loader). It works great.

Thanks for that suggestion. Win98 is there for some of my older apps that don't run on WinXP, so Linux won't do me there. I didn't realize NTFS sped things up, just thought this allowed larger drive size compatibility. Thanks for the info.

NTFS won't speed things up by any appreciable level. I still keep my audio recording RAIDS as FAT32. I'd stick with that too, Red.
You get better security/recoverability with NTFS, that's true. NTFS *can* be faster because it has a smaller RAM call, indexing can be beneficial, and faster seeks.
It can also be slower because of security checks, and the smaller clusters that cause fragmentation.

Charlie Russell on the Microsoft site has a great article. One of the things he comments on is that NTFS is really only best when you have calls for files larger than 4 gig, which is rare in audio-only, drives larger than 137 gig, and you need security. Otherwise, he recommends FAT32.

Aside from his article, I decided to stay FAT 32 on our RAIDS in the 2 audio rooms.

I didn't want to start a new thread for my OT and we were on the subject here so my question is:

After trying to install an Echo Digital PCI sound card I now have a HD with Win XP and some saved data files, that will not run properly. I don't want to elaborate, I do believe the saved data is salvageable. Obviously this is a (NTFS) boot disk, however could I simply plug this into my other computer's (NTFS Win XP) secondary drive slot--would it over look the XP install if this is the secondary drive so that I could just grab saved data files off of it?

It should allow you to configure the system as a dual boot system, and then upon starting up you choose which OS to boot from. There is a shortcut key to add/remove OS bootup selections, that you might have to use. Sorry, I can't remember exactly how to access this off the top of my head now.